Attentive readers might register the fleeting appearances of a semi-omniscient narrator, but most of the story is distributed between three primary characters who recount events leading up to the death from different and largely unreconciled perspectives: a young woman named Gesine Cresspahl, who had grown up in the fictional Mecklenburg town of Jerichow, latterly unparented and living with Jakob Abs as her adopted brother, and then resettled in the West where she is employed as a translator for NATO; a senior Stasi officer known as Herr Rohlfs, who is interested in using Jakob Abs to recruit Gesine Cresspahl as a spy when she comes East through the “dreaded, dreadful strangeness”12 of the border on a visit; and a reform-minded intellectual, a philologist named Jonas Blach, who has taught Gesine English at university and is shown teetering on the brink of fleeing West before he finally decides to stay in the GDR (where he is promptly arrested by Herr Rohlfs). The result is an exacting novel which never fully concludes any of its “speculations” about Abs and the circumstances of his unexpected death. It also leaves the reader little choice but to contribute another set of “speculations” about what exactly is going on, who is speaking and in what order.
Re-reading this book now, I wonder what, beyond puzzlement, a British reader might have made of it in 1971. The GDR may nowadays be sufficiently long-gone to re-emerge sporadically in billows of pinkish Ostalgie, but it was unmistakably real in the early Seventies, and I would like to think we were impressed by the determination with which Johnson used the novel to pursue a critical understanding that was not captive to either of the warring ideologies governing the divided Germany. Now as then, I admire Speculations about Jakob for insisting on a question that might be aimed at governments on both sides of the Cold War division: “What do you do with facts you don’t like?”13 I am also impressed to find that, while consistently refusing the polarised positions of its time, Speculations about Jakob does not claim for its author a stance of moral superiority. Though watchful and exactly observed, this is not the book of an all-seeing man of culture holding forth from a lofty peak “above the battle”,14 to use the phrase with which the Swiss novelist Romain Rolland urged writers across Europe to resist calls for nationalist loyalty in the early weeks of the First World War. Johnson may certainly have been an “artist” but, as the critic Reinhard Baumgart pointed out when introducing him as he was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 1971, he disliked the trappings of that particular office, preferring to consider himself a storyteller engaged in “a form of truth finding”.15
“Nobody is made of opinions”,16 so Johnson’s character Gesine Cresspahl informs the secret policeman Herr Rohlfs, in one of the novel’s many indications that the possibility of a transformed human society was not exhausted by the woeful inadequacies of the East German state after Walter Ulbricht came to power in 1950. The novel does not mock or condemn Abs’s decision to return to the GDR from the West, where he has seen Nazi attitudes persisting more or less unchecked and where his suggestion that a chimney sweep should be valued for being “part of society”17 has been taken for a joke. The novel is both realistic and unillusioned in its exploration of the various ways in which people may adjust and come to terms with life in the GDR, but it also searches for indications of different potentialities. The restlessness that would shape Johnson’s life as well as his narratives may be connected to this search for a political reality, in which it might be possible to live with personal integrity — a “moral Switzerland” as later novels will identify this impossible goal in the disappointed yearnings of Johnson’s primary character Gesine Cresspahl.
By the early Seventies, we “hopelessly decadent British”18 were at the beginning of a time in which avant-garde theories of “transgression” would seem to sweep the board in literary studies, but Johnson’s was not that kind of writing. Speculations about Jakob was formally innovative and could hardly be confused with “socialist realism” of the sort espoused by Stalinist ideologues in Eastern Europe. It was, however, fundamentally interested in testing real situations and in exploring, with the appraising eye that is so characteristic of Johnson, the ways in which people on both sides of Germany’s post-war division might hold on to a sense of reality even while confronting or apparently consenting to the ideologies ruling everyday life.
Hardstones in the tower of the thirteenth-century church of St Bartholomew, Recknitz.
I remember, too, being impressed by the novel’s politically nuanced articulation of place and landscape. Johnson makes his way past the anti-“Blood and Soil” scarecrows planted in every forest and meadow in those post-war years to evoke Mecklenburg, which he had himself explored vigorously by water, bicycle and foot, as “the homeland of recollections”.19 The novel surveys the deeply stratified historical geography of this province as it appears on the annotated map on which a schoolteacher of an earlier age has traced how the terrain was gouged and scraped into its present shape by glaciers, which had covered the land with boulders and “hardstones” that have been breaking backs and ploughs ever since the area was settled, first in prehistoric times and later by Romans, Slavs and Germans.
The historical depth of this flat and watery landscape, said to “glow from afar” for those prepared to concede its existence outside ideological or instrumental perspectives, matters little to Herr Rohlfs, the schoolteacher’s son. He is the agent of a fiercely curtailed official imagination in which castles and their tree-dressed parks are understood not as “petrified history” but as “memorials to exploitation”. There would be no room for wonder, attachment or pastoral consolation in his post-war regime: “Whoever is not for us is against us, and unjust with regard to progress. Who is for us: will be the question; and not: how do you like the night with the dark villages between the curves of the soil under the huge cloudy sky”.20
Johnson may have anticipated the charge of “nostalgia” here, of showing too much interest in a landscape that had so recently been conscripted into the Nazi imagery of racial belonging. A yearning for a lost and re-imagined Baltic world does indeed haunt his work from the earliest days, and yet he also uses this remembered landscape to confront and reinscribe the outrages of recent history. In Speculations about Jakob, Gesine Cresspahl remembers wondering when she heard news of the concentration camps as a thirteen-year-old girl in the little inland town of Jerichow in 1945: “How does it fit with the wet rustling beech leaves under our feet, with the swaying circling of fir tops overhead against the gray night sky… What had it to do with Jerichow that was lying at our feet as we emerged from the thicket on the top of the hill and halted, Jakob and I standing silently side by side: a sombre lump in the hollow, its church tower pointing and a light on in my father’s house”.21
I doubt that we really felt the weight of that distant child’s question in Kent, where not always retiring farmers would soon be grubbing up orchards that had once lain under the Battle of Britain, happy to take the compensation offered under the European Economic Community’s Common Agricultural Policy. Neither did we have any inkling of the ways in which Johnson’s lost and forbidden Mecklenburg articulated a sense of “utopia” close to that imagined by Ernst Bloch, the Marxist philosopher of “hope”, some of whose lectures Johnson had attended while studying at the University of Leipzig from 1954–6: “utopia” not as a totalitarian blueprint, nor as the weekend destination it is said have become in the pre-COVID age of Airbnb, but as the often fleeting promise of “a place and a state in which no one has yet been”.22
I wonder whether we would have been more or less able to grasp Uwe Johnson’s direction had we attended to the arguments being developed by Roger Taylor, a young English philosopher who was already at work on a book called Art, an Enemy of the People.23 Writing in Radical Philosophy in 1973, Taylor had invited us to wonder what people living two hundred years hence might choose if asked to identify the art of our time. Would they select the high Modernist works of Picasso, Moore, Britten and Eliot, or would they actually decide that “twentieth-century cent
ury art” consisted of “cranes, gasometers, power stations, farm machinery, cars (not forgetting motor-bikes), bubble-gum machines, petrol pumps, Stevie Wonder, Elvis, Vera Lynn, Ivor Novello, Harold Robbins, Agatha Christie, Leslie Charteris and here perhaps it makes sense to say, etc”.24 Persuaded that the established idea of “art” was actually an exclusive eighteenth-century construct inextricably connected to the rise of capitalism and its new elite,25 Taylor called for a radically different expression of creativity that might begin with the experience of working people. His examples included an American rancher encountered more than a decade previously by the Polish émigré sociologist Alicja Iwánska, who was then researching what she had assumed to be an entirely “art”-free community named “Good Fortune” in the western reaches of America’s Washington State. The man who removed Iwánska’s professional blinkers did so by taking her to a barn where he put on a mask and set to work with his welding machine: “‘Look at these sparks’ he would say. ‘Isn’t this like in Hollywood? … and this is me who is doing it all … sparks like fireworks, like stars, like aeroplanes … I feel really like God creating the world.’”26
Taylor was tempted by Iwánska’s conviction that a broader, less professional or “art”-based understanding of creativity was required of anyone who recognized that “Utopian thinking” was “particularly important for the functioning of highly complex modern nations”.27 In later writing, he would go on to associate working-class creativity with “virtual” forms of escape and self-defence: the various means of disappearance and “getting out of it” employed by members of the “unnoticed” majority.28 Although Taylor taught at the (also new) University of Sussex outside Brighton, he was, by 1973, already sending postcards from the Isle of Sheppey.
2. ON THE MOVE BUT NOBODY’S REFUGEE
The German Empire. c. 1910. Postcard by l’Amidon Remy.
Uwe Johnson had lived through an extreme twentieth-century history by the time he emerged from childhood. Born in 1934 in the Pomeranian town of Kammin, where his agriculturalist father Erich worked as supervisor of a dairy, he spent his first ten years in Anklam, moving in 1944 to an SS-run boarding school (a “German Homeland School” intended to raise a future Nazi elite) in Koscian, a town in a conquered region that had been granted to Poland after the First World War but was then being violently re-Germanised as “Kosten” under a Gauleiter, Arthur Greiser, determined to establish the model Nazi province of “Warthegau”.1 Johnson spent less than a year in this dreadful place, where the “final solution” had been pioneered in 1940 (psychiatric patients are said to have been gassed by SS commandos in a van with the words “Kaiser’s Coffee Company” written on its side).2 In January 1945, the school was closed as the Red Army advanced from the east. The older boys were ordered to join the town’s defenders, but those in the first year, including the ten-year-old Johnson, were allowed to flee west.
In some versions of this story, the children were taken to the town square, and told to join the chaotic retreat as best they could. Johnson remembered the circumstances rather differently in conversation with the Swiss writer Max Frisch. In this account, he describes feeling that he couldn’t leave before returning a book to the school library (the book was one of Karl May’s stories about the North American “Indians”, favoured by the Nazis who encouraged Germans to consider themselves an aboriginal people). Having missed the transport as a result of this characteristic punctiliousness (he got to the library to discover the staff had already fled), Johnson took to the road alone “in uniform, with no papers, possibly suspected of being a deserter”.3 Having survived the rout (Frisch describes him speaking of “streams of refugees, hunger, winter, the infantrymen on the retreat; a child’s experience that everyone only seeks to help themselves”), he managed to rejoin his family at Anklam before fleeing west into Mecklenburg. This had been a famously backward and peripheral province ever since the decline of the Hanseatic League in the fifteenth century. It is said that the nineteenth-century Prussian chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, “was fond of thinking that when the world was coming to an end, one could always go to Mecklenburg, as it will end fifty years later there”.4 Johnson arrived in time to see the land, which occupying British forces soon ceded to the USSR, being expropriated and brutally purged of its nobility (no regrets from Johnson there: the “Junkers” of Mecklenburg and Pomerania were notorious for having kept the peasantry in abject serfdom for centuries), and incorporated into the “Soviet Occupation Zone” that would itself be re-established as the German Democratic Republic in 1949.
The Old Forge, Recknitz.
The Johnsons were put up by Erich’s sister and brother-in-law in Recknitz, a tiny estate village thirteen kilometres north-east of a small inland town named Güstrow. A few weeks after they moved into a room in the smithy here, Erich Johnson disappeared. He had gone back to Anklam in the hope of taking care of some of the family’s affairs there, but never returned. Johnson would later tell Max Frisch that, having been reported as a Nazi by neighbours (“Because he had slightly better furniture than the rest of the petty bourgeois”), he was arrested and incarcerated without further investigation in an internment camp at Fünfeichen (he would be declared dead in 1948). Uwe, his younger sister Elke and their mother Erna lived on without him.
In Recknitz, Johnson, who had started life in the household of a father he later described as “a steward of lordly estates”,5 attended the village school as a refugee, and quickly discovered that “a child can be rented out for three weeks’ work on someone else’s fields in exchange for a hundred kilos of wheat”. He was there in the terrible months that followed the war. In her last novel City of Angels, Johnson’s friend and correspondent Christa Wolf, who had made her own flight from the east in 1945, would recall how Mecklenburg was then plagued by roaming gangs of Soviet soldiers — “raping and marauding through the countryside, the torn uniforms, the sorry state of their weapons, the peasant carts that had brought them to the centre of Europe”.6 Aggravated by hunger and typhus, among other diseases, these difficulties were also greatly increased after the Yalta and Potsdam treaties, at which Churchill and Stalin famously divided Europe with the help of a sheet of paper and a blue pencil. Many millions of ethnic Germans were expelled from lands allocated to Russia, Poland and Czechoslovakia, and arrived in East Germany to find the cities closed to them. As Victor Klemperer wrote on 17 August 1945, “they beg their way [and] are to be crammed into overcrowded Mecklenburg”.7 They turn up in Johnson’s novels too — hindered by their low status as “refugees” even years later.
Augraben ditch, Recknitz.
The scale of the disaster that unfolded during Johnson’s year in Recknitz is suggested by the memorial recently mounted on a great boulder in St Bartholomew’s churchyard: it names ninety “victims of War and Tyranny”, the great majority of whom died in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Johnson would leave a more shocking (and also arrestingly beautiful) image of the refugees who succumbed to starvation and disease. Writing more than twenty years later, he describes a harvest cart full of corpses arriving in his fictional town of Jerichow — a scene said to be derived from things he’d glimpsed as a boy in Recknitz (where refugees are reported to have been accommodated at the nearby mansion of Rossewitz). One evening, Johnson’s central character (he preferred the phrase “invented person”8 for its suggested sense of independent reality), the child Gesine Cresspahl, goes out for a walk that takes her past the mortuary chapel:
When she glanced to the right she saw both of the chapel’s double doors standing open, with something that looked like a shoe on the ground right outside them. She tried to tell herself that someone must have just slipped and fallen there, but she knew that now she wanted to see the bodies.
Maybe the living had brought lanterns in the night. The dead weren’t piled on one another the way they’d been in the cart. They sat in the little mortuary hall as if alive, their backs leaned against the walls, most of them with their eyes open. T
heir dresses, pants, and heavy jackets had been left on, out of fear of infection, or else put back on — they were a bit crooked on their bodies, too high on the neck, too high over the knee. Some were touching one another, holding their neighbour seated, otherwise they might slip. There were two together in the northwest corner, as if they’d sat down next to each other on their own. It was a young man, who seemed to Gesine twenty-two years old, with black hair and long muttonchop sideburns, in a neat black suit with shirt and tie — a city man whose shoes had come off somewhere. His head was turned to the side, as if he were looking at the wall. Then, though she was right up next to him, a girl lay half slumped down — a blonde with her hair up, all freckly — and she had slid halfway into the young man’s lap, and her posture was so peaceful, his hand on her shoulder seemed a little embarrassed, and not there voluntarily. They looked posed.9
Nowadays, the staff at John-Brinckman-Oberschule, in the nearby town of Güstrow, will gladly show visitors a reconstructed version of the small upstairs classroom in which an old desk is still reserved for Mecklenburg’s celebrated writer in the back row. Johnson, who moved with his mother and younger sister from Recknitz to Güstrow in the summer of 1946, might just about have managed a smile had he lived to look out of that room at the portrait stele of himself that, since 2007, has stood in the square below. In his first months at the school, he had suffered the disadvantage of being categorised “bourgeois”, which in his case, so Johnson would explain at Darmstadt in 1977, meant “the son of a civil servant from an abolished Department of Agriculture”.10 The situation improved once his mother, Erna, whose petit-bourgeois and incipiently pro-Nazi attitudes had caused Johnson to recoil, converted him into “the son of a worker” by getting herself a job as a conductor on the railway. Johnson shared his hopes for the possibilities of socialism promised by the emerging GDR with other members of a youth discussion group run by Gerhard Bosinski, a preacher at the cathedral-like Lutheran church across the square from the school who also confirmed Johnson in 1949. Eight members of this circle, which became connected to a movement of similar congregations elsewhere in the GDR collectively known as Junge Gemeinde, would be lined up at a show trial in September 1950 and jailed for distributing leaflets brought from the West demanding freedom of expression, pluralism and other basic rights. They were further condemned by their more or less frogmarched teachers, who assembled to approve of the draconian sentences. Johnson’s lesser, although perhaps no less defining, troubles came to a head while he was reading German language and literature at the University of Rostock. He was barred from continuing after his second year, having spoken out in defence of Junge Gemeinde, of which he himself was not a member, and insisted that the proscription and harassment of Christian students, encouraged by the official Free German Youth organisation under the young Erich Honecker’s leadership in 1953, was unconstitutional as well as wrong.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 3